About “Powerful”

The fifth track off Major’s third album Peace Is the Mission. According to Diplo

It features slight dialouge between British Pop singer, Ellie Goulding and Jamaican Reggae singer, Tarrus Riley (son of Jimmy Riley). The conversation suggests that these two people are in a deep relationship and each has a profoundly romantic and intimate effect on the other.

That record went through a lot of different steps. We treat all of our songs like DJs and remix them ourselves. We try things out of the ordinary, because people expect Major Lazer to have a very progressive sound with the production. The hook came from working with [Jamaican artist] Tarrus Riley. The name of the beat was “Powerful,” and the one thing about Jamaican artists is once you have a name for a beat, that’s gonna be the lyrics of the song, so you have to be really careful. Luckily, that was a good title. We wrote the lyrics with a girl named Ilsey, who’s a really awesome songwriter.

Ellie had been hitting me up around that time wanting to work with Major Lazer, so I sent her this demo. She was like, ‘whoa, this is the perfect record for me to do with you guys.’ She changed some bits around and did that awesome bridge for us. Then I had my boy Switch, who was one of the original members of Major Lazer, do some drum productions on it and Skrillex added some touches.